The modes of expression of impulsive forces
There are only few pages, but they are dense and enigmatic perhaps more than any book ever published: La Monnaie Vivante is the text through which Klossowski gives his farewell to writing – from then on (1970) he would be involved in different projects, such as translations, art exhibitions: paintings and movies – and at the same time it constitutes a powerful introduction to the Anti-Œdipe, an an- œdipic incipit from a different author. La Monnaie Vivante creates a philosophical space to decrypt, building an underground passage that connects all different publications and stations of thought constituting the French revolutionary Rhizosphere: Nietzsche’s Notebook (1887- 1888) by Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), L’Anti-Œdipe (1972), Nomad Thought (1972), Circulus Vitiosus (1972), Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971), Lectures on the Will to Knowledge (1970- 1971), Libidinal Economy (1974). The Klossowskian volume breaks, breaches, overflows and distributes with few incisive sentences large gashes of thought and possible research avenues that Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard will then walk wildly, rapidly and productively, as “young wolves of future revolutions”. The context within which the paradox of Living Currency is articulated is one where industrial civilisation – Klossowskian term which seems more accurate than the general “capitalism” – has diffused its negative effects by infecting the whole society through institutes of uprightness and conformity, which connotes the attribution to the means of production of a powerful contamination – and, thus, affective engraving–capacityontheindividualsand the community. That is the same homogeneous, levelled, economized and nihilistic society that Nietzsche described in the fragment The Strong of the Future. The Nietzsche-Klossowski axis, then, assigns to the levelled industrial civilisation a dangerous production capacity that is both affective and infective. Foucault, on the same wavelength, would explain the positivity of power with a similar argumentative leverage: “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression” (PK, 119). Deleuze and Guattari hold a similar position and raise the level of analysis bypassing ideological and psychoanalytical nuances: “[E]verything is objective or subjective, as one wishes. That is not the distinction: the distinction to be made passes into the economic infrastructure itself and into its investments. Libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal, even though the two correspond to two modes of different investments of the same reality as social reality” (AE, 345). If Marx believes that the structure is the economic skeleton of society and the superstructure is everything that derives from it, Klossowski reverses the framework and sets as the “ultimate infrastructure” the “behavior of emotions and instincts” (LC, 3) Consequently, it follows that “economic standards form in turn a substructure of affect, not the ultimate infrastructure” and that, more in depth, “economic norms are, like the arts or the moral or religious institutions, or like all the forms of knowledge, one mode of the expression and representation of instinctive forces” (LC, 3). As Foucault had already realized in his letter to Klossowski, the triangle desire, value, simulacrum that dominates us and has been characterising us for millennia, already existed ever since the invention of money in Asia Minor in the VIII century B.C.; hence, the triangle must be treated as something forged in the depths of times, because the historical period of time in which reality gets monetarized is certainly the product of a slow centuries-long process of transformation, before reaching its own metal round form that has been bequeathed until today. In Phrygia, where Greek mythology locates the fundamental passage from pre-money to actual money, the coining of the nomisma bore the effigy of the goddess Moneta, the wife of King Midas, Demodice or Hermodice; according to Heraclides Lembus, on the money of Cumae coined by queen Hermodice the Genius of Money (Genio della moneta) holds the scale and the cornucopia in his hands. Greek mythology suggests us that, ever since its invention, the concept of money figures in popular wisdom as a concatenation of sovereignty, sacredness, fertility and equity; and already in ancient times there were people who used to rise against the improper use of the circulation of the “metal disks”: Julius Pollux, at the apex of Hellenism in the Roman Empire, critiqued the obolastates, i.e. those who used to lend and weight the oboli, and the obolastatein, the practice of lending oboli. The perverse intersection of simulacrum, value and desire, presented by Foucault as the explanatory structure of universal economy, is then absolutely coherent with the rhizospheric analysis of money. Klossowski of Living Currency suggests that monetary economics and theology are nothing but reciprocal disguises: money,
from the beginning of Western civilisation,
has been regarded as the universal
representative instrument of a generalized
economy which already has an innate
abstract potential for sacredness and
sovereignty, and, in turn, for desire-will to
power at its highest level. According to
Klossowski, money is the universal
simulacrum; in industrial societies the
domain of money, after centuries of
adjustments, has completely substituted
the real world and misrepresents its
subjugated phantasm. Klossowski had
already matured the concept of a universal
economy through the Nietzsche scrutinizer
of Chaos of the passages on energy in
relation to world structure: “At a given
moment of the accumulated force of the
emotions, there is also the absolute
condition of a new distribution, and hence a
disruption of equilibrium. Nietzsche
conceives of a universal economy whose
effects he experiences in his own moods”
(NVC, 110). The line that links Nietzsche and
the vicious circle (1969) and Living Money
(1970) is, thus, the analysis of impulsive
simulacra that act upon generalized a
universal economy. We have already
entered the Anti-Œdipe, the Nietzsche of
the 80’s of XIX century, and the Foucault of
the 70’s of XX century. This represents the
core of revolutionary Nietzscheism which
influenced the street struggle of 1968 and
further on, pure energy and dynamite ready
for future struggles: Klossowski develops
with great clarity the theoretical nucleus of
impulse-body-simulacrum-value-
production-consumption arguing that “The
way they [instinctive forces] express
themselves, both in the economy and finally
in our industrial world, is subject to the way
they have been handled by the economy of
the reigning institutions. That this
preliminary and ultimate infrastructure is
more and more determined by its own
reactions to the previously existing
substructures is unquestionably true, but
the forces at play continue the struggle
among infrastructures into the
substructures. So, though these forces
initially express themselves in a specific
manner according to economic standards,
they themselves create their own
repression, as well as the means of smashing
that repression, which they experience to
different degrees: and this goes on as long
as does the battle among the instincts,
which is waged within a given organism for
and against the formation of the organism
as their agent, for and against psychic and
bodily unity. Indeed, that is where the first
“production” and “consumption” schemes
come into being, the first signs of
compensation and haggling” (LC, 4). Thus is
the key passage for the whole Rhizomatic
universe: Klossowski shows in this
theoretical nucleus the hidden role of the
sphere of instincts. Given its concealment,
or its secluded core due to a lack of visible
external outlets, the sphere of instincts
gets “economized” inside the industrial
world. What the industrial world consumes
the most is the instinct to procreate, which
is a product of the voluptuousness of the instinctual body, labelling it as a good but at
the same time, and in the opposite direction,
the body procures emotions, concealed and
excessive, abstract substance for a
“phantasm” – the ghostly entity which
recurs obsessively in Klossowski’s thought
– upon which instincts act again as
backward-action. “Nothing exists apart
from impulses that are essentially
generative of phantasms. The simulacrum
[i.e. the Nietzschean Trugbild] is not the
product of a phantasm, but its skilful
reproduction, by which humanity can
produce itself, through forces that are
thereby exorcized and dominated by the
impulse” (NCV, 133). This is the level at
which the phantasm has been already
created and instincts and passions are not
available anymore to consume and cede the
phantasm itself – that is, the producer of
desire which reproduces itself. Additionally,
this is the crucial point around which the
emotional value, otherwise called libidinal
value, is formed – as Nietzsche points out,
“in place of moral values, purely naturalistic
values” (Opere fr.9[8] vol. VIII, section 2, p.
6 quoted in NVC, 106). The translation of
impulsive forces, the instincts, in “economic
representations” of the emotional value –
according to Nietzsche, the only being that
we know is a being that has representations
(O, fr.11[33] vol. V, section 2) – will then be a
simulacrum: which simulacrum could be
better than the merge of money,
simulacrum itself of objective value, and a
living body, simulacrum which incarnates
the procreative phantasm? The synthesis
of such double simulacrum in the economy
of industrial civilisation is the living money,
a simulacrum reinforced by emotion that it
procures, hence the “living money” is the
expression of the libidinal value carved in
bodies. What industrial civilisation
consumes through standardization – the
various simulacra of the phantasm:
prostitution, sexual slavery, eroticism,
assorted industries of pleasure – the body
produces through economization.
Consumed good vs. libidinal value. This
means that the body “manifests itself”
attributing value to the instincts but, in
order to defend it “impulsive phantasm”
that is desire, opposes the «mechanical
simulacrisation» of industrial economy. The
body is the battlefield of the harsh clash
between opposite forces: social production
against desiring production. Such clash can
yield two opposing outcomes: the first –
and unfortunately the prevailing in both the
industrial civilisation and in the rising digital
one – is the hyper-gregariousness of the
individual, who is reduced to a mere
instrument to support tamed passions and
desires captured by social standardization
whose objective is the unity reproducible in
the production line; the second is where
instincts and affections prevail on the
repression of impulses and the “support”
acquires its own sovereignty by
degregarizing itself. In the stage that
follows such rediscovered sovereignty -
through the evident self-organisation of
behaviours- singularity itself gets
desubjectivised overturning its own nature of stable subject, and opening itself to the
industrious metamorphosis of desires, and,
thus, to perpetual transformation and to
the extreme idleness of the nomads of the
future.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
